The Mill
by Lucillia
Summary: Moriarty deals with a matter of obligation in the place where it all began.
1. The Mill

_A small dark-haired boy sat on the end of the sofa in his family's sitting-room watching as a number of black-clad people wandered about his home gathering in small knots, speaking with each-other in hushed whispers and occasionally sending glances his way. The words he heard most often were "That poor boy...". _

_Though he knew he shouldn't have been, what he was feeling most at the moment was boredom. __As he was considering shutting himself in his room so he could play with his toys, a red-haired woman who was holding a black-haired newborn approached him._

_"Hello Jimmy." the woman said, not talking down to him like the others who'd bothered to speak to him had done. "I was wondering if you could do something for me."_

_"What?" he asked._

_"I have to look after my husband to make sure he behaves himself, but I can't do that if I have to look after the baby as well, so I was wondering if you could help me. I know that he will be safe with a brave boy like you." the woman who had "Uncle" Henry's catlike eyes said with a smile._

Jim stood in the middle of the wreck that towered over Spinner's End. Once it had been an active textile mill which had drawn families to Cokeworth from all over for generation after generation. Two such families that had been drawn here had been his who had come from Ireland and the Evans family which had originally hailed from Wales via Liverpool amongst other places. Both his parents and Henry Evans had worked in the mill during its final years before it had finally closed down upon the death of its final owner.

When the mill had died so too had the town. The first businesses along the town's high street shuttered days after the mill had closed, and now, nearly three decades later, Cokeworth's high street had three empty shopfronts for each active business, though he was working to change that since such blight was bad for his business which depended on people actually being able to pay for his services.

Today, the mill which brought up many memories for Jim had a practical purpose, as it was a nice, quiet, out of the way place where he could get some work done. While he generally let his business run itself, playing matchmaker and connecting people with what they needed at the time, he occasionally dove in and got his hands dirty in order to stave off boredom. He had several personal projects running, and this one had mostly been on the back burner for years because it was rather uninteresting, but even he had a sense of duty and honor, warped though it was.

Considering the image he projected during his infrequent forays into the public as "himself", many would be surprised by his working class origins. He'd been born in Ireland in 1974 to parents of modest means, and his family had moved to Cokeworth to get a job at the mill which was still hiring at the time soon after. His father had met Henry Evans at the mill, and they'd become fast friends, his father having not held the fact that Evans was the foreman against him since Evans had worked his way to the top rather than having had the position handed to him through connections. During those early days, he had frequently ended up at the Evans home where he had been watched by Mrs. Evans and occasionally her daughters who were frequently away dealing with lives of their own while his parents were at work.

Henry Evans had died in the August of 1979. His family had claimed that it had been from natural causes, but he knew otherwise, having been there at the time. It hadn't been members of the "hidden" wizarding community which had been going through a bloody civil war during that period that had done him in, as many who were in the know about the magical community suspected these days. Henry Evans was not what he had seemed. Sure, he was a devoted family man, and probably the best foreman the textile mill had seen prior to its closure, but one only needed to trace the trail of "industrial accidents" that had followed behind him all the way back to his youth in Wales to realize that wasn't all he was.

Violet Evans followed soon after. She'd been hiding the cancer from the children because she hadn't wanted them to worry. Following Violet's demise, the eldest daughter Petunia had shaken the last of the dust of Cokeworth from her feet and cut off all contact with her family's friends and their families who weren't of high enough social status for the image she tried to project in the upper-middle class neighborhood in which she lived with her husband Vernon. On the other hand, despite the fact that she was often busy, the younger daughter Lily had kept in touch with everyone up until shortly before Toby Snape's son had informed the neighborhood that she'd died.

When his own mother died in an automobile accident, leaving him with a distant and out of touch father who'd let him get away with anything and everything including murder, it had been Lily who had comforted him following the funeral.

It was because of this and everything else that he owed the Evans family that he was here today despite the mundanity of his task which could've been easily handled by one of his lieutenants or even contracted out had he been so inclined. When he was done, he might leave the end result of tonight's task for his other, more interesting project to find. It would be interesting to see what He would make of it.

Deciding that he'd left his prisoner waiting long enough as he stood around and reminisced about his early childhood, he walked up to the old supervisor's office where the man was tied to a chair and removed the bag from his head. The man who had been inbred to the point that he obviously looked it glared up at him hatefully. If looks could kill, he would've been a pile of ash.

Not in the least bit intimidated since he'd seen worse, he removed the gag from the man's mouth.

"Do you have anything to say for yourself?" he asked, sounding about as bored as he felt at the moment.

Clearing out the trash was an annoying chore, but it had to be done.

"The minute I'm free mudblood, you and your pathetic muggle family are dead!" the man snarled.

"You're mistaken." he said, allowing a reptillian smile to grace his lips. "You're the one who's dead. But first, I'm going to utterly destroy you."

"As if mugglespawn like you could do anything to a member of the Ancient House of..." the man started, arrogantly ignoring the predicament he was in until his attention was turned to the monitors that that had been set up across from the chair that the man was sat in.

"I'm sure you recognize this place." he said as he pointed to the monitor that displayed the interior of the tea shop that the man's wife frequented. An interior that contained his wife at one of the tables. The second monitor showed the Ravenclaw Common Room where the man's younger son was studying, and the third the shop where his elder son worked.

Over the next hour, he showed the man that no place was safe, not even Hogwarts, and that when he advertised the fact that he had contacts everywhere, he really meant everywhere. His mildly disinterested expression never wavered as he watched the man finally realize that what he was seeing wasn't a trick when the first pieces of evidence arrived. While this was more of a personal matter, it wasn't_ that _personal.

"Why?" the man finally asked when all of his bluster and bravado had been bled away. "Why do all this? I never did anything to you."

"You tried to kill Harry Potter's family." he replied, just as disinterested with the answer as he'd been with the proceedings.

The man started laughing brokenly.

"You're just another one of his worshipers! Another one of the arse kissers who won't get more than five words out of him as he passes you in the street if that! He's not going to appreciate what you've done for him. He'll just arrest you like any common thug. I almost wish I could be there to see how he reacts when you tell him, seeking whatever scrap of approval you think you'll get." the man said, obviously trying to get a rise out of him, lashing out in the hopes of hurting him in some way just as he'd been hurt.

"Actually," he said, feeling nothing for the jabs the man had made an attempt at, since none of them had hit any sore spots. "I couldn't care less about the 'Great' Harry Potter."

"Then why?" the man asked, looking almost mystified, unable to comprehend the fact that someone would go so far for someone they didn't care about.

"When I was three, I witnessed a murder." he stated matter-of-factly. "The foreman helped an old drunk named Toby down the stairs outside this office. Gave him a little push..."

"What does that...?" the man asked, finishing his question with a helpless gesture that encompassed the monitors that showed teams of Aurors bagging and tagging a trio of bodies.

"The foreman was the one who sat me aside and gave me a number of lessons which made me the man I am today. I could say that I owe everything to Henry Evans." he said, giving the man another reptilian smile.

_Strongly suspecting that he was being given an unpaid babysitting job, the boy named Jim held out his arms for the baby that the red-haired woman had asked him to look after. Rather than being light like one of the dolls that belonged to a girl down the street, the small blanket wrapped bundle that the woman handed to him was startlingly heavy._

_"His name is Harry James Potter" Lily said. "I named him Harry after my father, and while my husband claims the James part is after him since it is tradition in his family for a firstborn son to be given the father's first name as a middle name, I named him after a different James."_

_The boy looked up into the woman's catlike eyes, his own eyes asking a question._

_"I named him after a brave boy who stayed with my father until the end, even though..." Lily continued before finding herself unable to finish the statement._

Decades later, that same boy now grown to a man walked out of the ruins of the place which he could almost confidently claim was the place where it all started, not caring for the mess he'd left behind him. Honor, what little of it he had, had been satisfied tonight and the wrong that had been committed against the Potters had been redressed. Potter wouldn't appreciate the gesture and would try to capture him if he learned of it, but then again it hadn't been made for him.

_Funny, _James Moriarty thought as his mind turned to the current generation of Henry Evans' family. _Funny that the one who had been named for a man like Evans, and for...What was it that Holmes called me? Oh yes, the "Napoleon of crime"...that one who had been named for men such as us could be as unlike us as Harry Potter is._


	2. Death and the Boy

Jim smiled brightly as he played with the plastic car that the red-haired lady who looked like Uncle Harry whose name was really Henry had given him for his birthday. He was three now, which made him a big boy. Earlier that day, his parents had brought him to something called a "company picnic" which had been in a crowded park. Because they'd "had a bit too much to drink", they had asked Uncle Harry and Aunt Violet to look after him for a while. Aunt Violet had a headache and had to go home however, leaving him with Uncle Harry. Since Uncle Harry had some business that had needed to be seen to at the office, he was doing his best to play quietly in the corner.

As he drove his car up a wall, a large scary man with a hooked nose walked into the office. The man smelled like his da did when he spent too much time at the pub and had to sleep on the couch.

"You wanted to see me Harry?" the man slurred.

"Have a seat Mr. Snape." Uncle Harry said, gesturing to the chair on the other side of the desk he was seated on.

"No need to get all _formal._" the man said, not taking the offered seat. "You can call me Toby like everyone else, unless you think you're above everyone else."

"Of course not Toby," Uncle Harry said. "The fact that our children had a falling-out last year doesn't need to impact our working relationship."

The big man gave Uncle Harry a _Look_, but didn't say anything.

"Speaking of our children's falling-out, I've been hearing interesting things from Lily this Summer." Uncle Harry said.

The big man scowled.

"While our children's falling-out doesn't need to impact our working relationship, personal attacks against my daughter will result in your termination." Uncle Harry continued.

The big man's expression rapidly shifted towards something a bit more subservient, the scowl swiftly melting away like ice in an oven.

"Please Harry," the big man said. "I need this job. Eileen's gone, and Sev's run off to God only knows where. This job is all I've got."

Uncle Harry sighed.

"We'll talk about this again when you're sober." Uncle Harry said, standing up and walking towards the door.

The big man stood and followed. Curious, Jim followed after. As the two men walked down the hallway, the big man with the hooked nose apologized to Uncle Harry and begged him to allow him to keep his job.

"I was drunk and didn't know what I was saying. I promise I won't call your daughter a whore again." the big man said as he and Uncle Harry stood at the head of the stairs.

"No, you won't." Uncle Harry said as he tightened his grip around the man's arm and gave him a firm push.

The man windmilled for balance for a brief moment before he went tumbling forward. There were several loud thumps and then silence.

That was the first time that James Moriarty had witnessed death, and it would be far from the last. Perhaps because he was too young to understand it, the horror of the death didn't really impact him as it would most people had they witnessed it. Looking down the stairs down at the body, he hadn't seen a massive pool of blood or bones sticking out in odd places or anything like that. There had just been the scary man laying there staring at nothing, his head tilted at a funny angle that should've been impossible.

"I'm sorry Jimmy, I didn't mean for you to see that." Uncle Henry said when he noticed that he was there and led him away. "Sometimes things like that need to be done for the good of the public however. I would've done it sooner, but I had to wait until Sev was seventeen, otherwise...Backward barbarians, the lot of them."

On the way back to the office, Jimmy was treated to a lecture on why some individuals should be culled from the herd for the good of mankind, and why doing such wasn't a crime despite what the law said. Once he reached the office, Uncle Henry called the police and reported an accident.

"Always make it look like an accident Jimmy," he said as soon as he hung up the phone following an assurance from the dispatcher that a constable would be there soon. "If they think it's an accident, they will be less likely to look for other causes, and they'll be less likely to go looking for whoever was responsible. Accidents happen in factories all the time."

Eventually, the constable arrived and Uncle Harry had answered the brown-haired man's questions with things like "...thought I'd do it while everyone was out at the picnic so everyone wouldn't be watching...thought it would be easier if it wan't so public...had a temper you see...didn't take too well to being fired...was already drunk when he turned up...must've lost his balance on the stairs after he stormed out of the office..."

Seemingly satisfied, the constable left after waiting for the coroner to come and pick up the body of one late and mostly unlamented Tobias Snape. From his spot behind Henry Evans' legs, Jimmy watched as the body of the large scary man who was nearly twice the size of his Uncle Harry was bagged up and carted away.

This lesson stuck with the boy long after he put it in effect dealing with a little bully named Carl Powers who had particularly enjoyed picking on a boy four years his senior, taking advantage of the fact that he and Jimmy Moriarty were roughly the same size. "He laughed at me" didn't even begin to describe what the boy had done, but would've nearly been enough for the awkward teenager who had been wandering through the Eighties with little to no guidance becuase his mentors had died the decade before and his father was too wrapped up in his own grief to deal with him. Then however, on that day when his parents had overindulged at the company picnic and left him with a friend, Jimmy had been a small, bright, child who didn't really understand what he'd seen and heard yet.

The second time Jimmy had witnessed death was more traumatic and had a greater impact on him than the first.

Two years after Jimmy Moriarty had watched Tobias Snape take a tumble down the stairs, he'd been on a routine business trip with Uncle Harry that turned out to be anything but business as usual. His dealing with the occasional problem in a terminal manner wasn't the only area where Henry Evans who was called Harry by just about everybody acted outside the law. Henry preferred to deal with victimless crimes, or crimes he saw as being either victimless or as being to the benefit of society despite what the law said. Unfortunately, most of the rivals he had and the people he brushed elbows with in the grayer ares of society were the sort that Henry Evans would've culled for the good of society, since such crimes payed, and money attracted greed, and greed tended to come bundled with other character faults.

Many would've called Henry a human trafficker amongst other things. As far as he was concerned regarding the so-called human trafficking, he was helping people escape the Soviet Union and other miserable places and helping them set up better lives via the mill whose owners didn't look too closely at the employees so long as their bottom line wasn't hurt. Drugs were something else he dealt in, finding the laws that had been made in a bout of hysteria that had been brought about by moral panic to be ridiculous since they made criminals out of otherwise law abiding people, and figuring it would be better if people got the real stuff from him rather than getting something that was cut with who knew what from someone else who didn't have their interests at heart and getting sick as a result. The fact that he made money at these things was just a bonus as far as he was concerned. A nice bonus, but a bonus nonetheless.

Henry Evans could've lived far more opulently than he and his family did, but his modest home had served a practical purpose as well as a personal one. When one was looking for a drug and human trafficking kingpin, one would not look in the lower-middle class home of the foreman of a textile mill. The Dursley home in Little Whinging and a trust for any children that the Dursleys may have which had been discreetly set up by a cousin had been a wedding present from the father of the bride however, and the Potter family's flagging fortunes significantly picked up following James Potter's marriage to Lily Evans as well.

Unfortunately, Evans' successes in his second career had drawn unwanted attention to him. Organized attention who didn't like some Welsh factory worker upstart and his friends and cousins who dwelled in the shadier side of society edging in on their business.

Little Jimmy Moriarty who was a frequent guest in the Evans home and the second son the Evanses had never had had been trailing behind his "Uncle Harry" on the day that a rival decided to make his displeasure with Henry Evans known. Henry had walked down to Spinner's End to have some words with a young runner who'd been skimming a little off the top when the ambush was sprung. Being a blighted neighborhood in the bad part of town, and having been so for generations, people knew when not to see and hear anything, and therefore hadn't seen or heard a quartet of armed bruisers in suits leading Harry Evans to a car despite the fact that they quietly gossiped about it amongst themselves for years after that day.

What happened next was practically a scene out of a mobster movie, which had likely provided the inspiration for the batch of overly-muscled dimwits who'd worked for a rival of Evans who was based in London. Both Henry and Jimmy had been driven out to the countryside where Henry had been shot. One of the men had pointed a gun at Jimmy, but one of the other men had made him lower it.

"He's just a kid." the man said, pushing the gun barrel towards the ground.

"But, he's seen us!" the man who'd been about to shoot him said.

"He's what? Three?" another of the men said. "The police won't be able to get anything out of him."

With that, the men had gotten into their car and driven off, leaving him with a rapidly fading Henry Evans. Following his Uncle Harry's death, he cried for one of the very few times throughout his entire life. He was still crying as he turned towards the road, walked to the nearest house which was a long ways away, called the only number besides his own that he knew, and waited for Aunt Violet to come and get him. This could be excused however because he was five, and Henry Evans' shooting had all of the blood that Tobias Snape's death had lacked.

Violet Evans had eventually come, and a doctor who'd often dealt with the immigrants that Henry ran through Cokeworth had been persuaded to list "Natural Causes" on Henry's death certificate.


End file.
